When I was following Synology communities closer, the common wisdom was that the expansion units weren’t great in either performance, stability or cost, and you were better off buying a new, bigger unit and then selling your old one used to recoup the cost difference.
I’m also in the same position, I have a DS918+ that is full. It’s also 6 years old and probably on the tail end of getting software updates so I’m weighing my choices…
For anyone who’s not in the Synology ecosystem, this is what the release notes are:
Starting from this version, the processing of media files using HEVC (H.265), AVC (H.264), and VC-1 codecs will be transitioned from the server to end devices to reduce unnecessary resource usage on the system and enhance system efficiency. These codecs are widespread on end devices such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs. If the end device does not support the required codecs, the use of media files may be limited.
This mostly affects things like streaming to a TV, streaming box or tablet with limited codec support.
When watching videos on Linux, the support on the NAS itself doesn’t matter, just the support only your PC. When opening videos over SMB in dolphin, the codec support on the NAS does not come into play. The thumbnails are generated by your PC.
Just install VLC on your PC and it will play whatever you throw at it, regardless of OS codecs. I would not re-encode anything.
edit: It looks like the biggest impact is using Synology Photos - it can’t generate thumbnails for HEIF photos/HEIC videos anymore
People: Specifically add “site:reddit” to their searches to avoid slop and get real human responses
Reddit: Replaces the real human responses with slop
How can Spez be so clueless
Another reminder to developers to not bother with public APIs, just screen-scrape or reverse-engineer the official app private API.